LED luminaires and lamps are increasing in popularity and it is expected that this popularity will continue to increase in the future as their light output improves both quantitatively and qualitatively. With lighting units that include LED modules it is important to prevent overheating of the LED module, because overheating can seriously reduce the service life of the lighting element, resulting in premature failure of the LED lamp/luminaire.
In many currently available LED lamps and luminaires one or more LED modules together with their associated driver(s) and other control components are mounted together on the same printed circuit board, generally a metal printed circuit board (MCPCB), often made of aluminum, and this is in close thermal contact with a heat sink. This arrangement allows for the rapid transfer of heat away from the LED module(s).
As LED's enter mainstream lighting applications, consumers expect their operation to mimic traditional lighting units such as incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes. This includes being able to dim LEDs and being able to control LEDs remotely from hand held devices such as smart phones and tablets by way of appropriately designed Applications (“Apps”). Furthermore, a new generation of ‘smart’ light fitting luminaires is starting to become available that contain detectors that sense information about their local environment and which communicate this information to a processor. These light fitting luminaires are a way of collecting data about the environment in which they are situated. This overcomes the problems associated with dedicated sensors in a particular location, such as a room thermostat which only covers a limited area, because a building or house will contain many light fitting luminaires, each capable of gathering data. The data gathered by these luminaires thus has a much higher granularity than data collected by other approaches, and is therefore more useful.
These various advances inevitably require additional processing power, often by way of control integrated circuits (ICs) with increased functionality, including data storage capacity and wireless communication functionally. These can all produce significant amounts of heat, in addition to the heat produced by the LED, leading to a requirement for larger heat sinks in order to keep the temperature of the LED MCPCB down to acceptable levels.
There is a need for a system to overcome or mitigate some or all of the problems outlined above.